What is the value of intellectual playfulness? Traditional characterizations of the ideal thinker often leave out playfulness; the ideal inquirer is supposed to be sober, careful, and conscientiousness. But elsewhere we find another ideal: the laughing sage, the playful thinker. These are models of intellectual playfulness. Intellectual playfulness, I suggest, is the disposition to try out alternate belief systems for fun – to try on radically different perspectives for the sheer pleasure of it. But what would the cog-nitive value be (...) of such playfulness? I suggest that intellectual playfulness function as, at the very least, a kind of intellectual insurance policy against epistemic traps. An epistemic trap is a belief system that re-directs good-faith inquiry to bad results. Am epistemic trap manipulates background beliefs to fend off contrary evidence. For example, a conspiracy theory might include a set of beliefs about how the mainstream media has been taken over by some vicious cabal. Normal epistemic attempts will be captured by a well-wrought epistemic trap, because normal attempts at inquiry are guided by these background beliefs -- which set what counts as a plausible path to explore, and what is implausible or beyond the pale. And a clever epistemic trap will manipulate those background beliefs for ill effect. Intellectual playfulness, on the other hand, isn’t motivated by an epistemic interest in the truth, but in the sheer pleasure of intellectual exploration. Since intellectual playfulness isn’t oriented towards the truth, it won’t be constrained by an agent’s background beliefs – it won’t, for example, prefer to investigate apparently more plausible pathways. Intellectual playfulness offers an opportunity to escape from epistemic traps. But intellectual playfulness has its own limitations. It will only drive us to explore belief systems when that exploration is fun. What we need is an array of differently-motivated exploratory tendencies – empathy, curiosity, playfulness – each of which will each cover for the others’ limitations. (shrink)

Historically, Early German Romanticism has been viewed as a reaction against the science-oriented and rationalistic Enlightenment philosophies that preceded it; exemplary of such readings is that of G. W. F. Hegel, who accuses the Romantics of irrationalism and a retreat from community. The purpose of the following thesis is to refute Hegel's criticism and argue that Romantic philosophy presents us with a truth-oriented discourse. Although others have defended the Romantics against Hegel, the reading presented here is unique insofar as it (...) foregrounds the importance of human sociability, discursive practices, and Immanuel Kant's conception of genius for Romantic philosophy. On my reading, Hegel's criticism can be divided into three parts: the accusation of the egoism of the Romantic genius, the charge of the elitism of the Romantic circle, and the claim that the Romantics give all authority to the individual. The first chapter explicates Hegel's criticisms of the Romantics, showing how they both parallel and expand on his understanding of the artistic genius. The second chapter takes up Hegel's charge of Romantic egoism, arguing with the help of Schleiermacher and Kant that the Romantic self comes to be communally constituted through its interactions with others. The third chapter explores Hegel's charge of elitism, analyzing Friedrich Schlegel's ironic discourse, along with the lectures of the later Fichte, to argue that the Romantics' epistemological fallibilism necessitates a populist expansion of philosophical truth-seeking. The fourth chapter concerns itself with the issue of the authority of the exceptional individual, arguing that the Romantic discourse conceives of its audience as ideal rather than actual, but that this idealization is a humble solicitation rather than an arrogant demand; that is, this chapter shows that the Romantics follow the Kantian account of genius in claiming that a social warrant is necessary for sorting sense from nonsense. The conclusion points out that this Romantic picture of the community as both responsive to individuals and capable of substantial change—a community of genius—acts as a corrective for a conservative tendency in Hegel's own account of ethical life. Accordingly, this thesis both refutes Hegel's historically important reading of the Early Romantics and develops a novel account of Romantic sociability that informs the Romantics' theories of the self, the community, and their discursive interplay. (shrink)